Lighting up the dark continent

By Nick van der Leek

Day 1 at the Digital Citizen Indaba

I find myself glancing away from the keynote speaker, my gaze drifting to the delegates and speakers-in-waiting that fill the small amphitheatre-lectorium. Lots of squares of light fill the room, but not quite one for each delegate.

I have my own microsquare - a new Samsung phone capable of sending content from my hand direct to the internet. We’re armed, and our armoury consists of all this stuff: electronic gadgets capable of utilising the massive software tools and the world wide reach of the Web.

Blogging is about having your own space on the internet. It’s about individuals expressing themselves, and in the end, it;s fair to suggest that the unarticulated dream of blogging is for the world - for each person in the world - to have a voice.

Some voices, obviously, may not be as interesting as others, and that will be reflected in how much people visit their sites. But others really need to be heard: and they will be.

The great thing about blogging (and a new blog comes into existence every second - the world now has over 50 million blogs)is that the crowd no longer just reads - they can write as well. The spaces on the internet are just like real world spaces (like living rooms, or bars). The vast majority of bloggers are talking about ’what they had for lunch’ or ’what they thought of a fottball game’.

Just as on reporter.co.za (a citizen blog essentially), quality is an issue. I have to admit, if I know that some of my fairly uninformed articles are getting exposure, then just how valuable is the material on the internet (particularly on blogs). And especially, how relevant are blogs when compared to top notch stuff like the New York Times.

The power of the blog is that we can tap (and assess) the wisdom of the crowd. And contributors - especially to citizen sights - can also call out errors on articles, as frequently happens. Reporter.co.za encourages accuracy and I think most contributors are fairly rigorous about at least not having textual errors. Fact checking is less simple.

Interestingly, a lot of citizen media has come about because of blogging (not the other way round). I have found, for example, that all much of the time I spent blogging is now being diverted to reporter.co.za. In some ways I think this is good and encouraging (I get more exposure), but in other ways, it’s also not exactly what blogging is about. Blogging is sometimes being brutally honest and personal about issues personal to ourselves, and sometimes we have a specific (rather than mainstream) Joe Public in mind. The other issue is that blogging for money is different to blogging for the love of it (or out of brutal necessity, or even activism).

What we are seeing is radical changes going on in the internet. And that’s exciting.
Now we all have the ability - as Dan Gilmore wrote - to ’commit acts of journalism’. We can all be contributors on a level playing field, and that’s something new and radical in world that has become increasingly flat.

All of this is good news for Africa.